Why digital transformation is easiest when you're still a small business

There's an insidious trap that many small business owners fall into when they
hear the buzzword “digital transformation.” They often think this doesn't
apply to me, I'm not big enough to pour expensive resources into new
technology. This is the pitfall that many fall into who stumble with digital
transformation: the belief that it's about technology.

Large companies use their size and purchasing power to hire data science
teams, software and data engineers, tap into huge supplies of data, and
purchase expensive software systems for managing and analyzing their data. And
yet research shows that a growing percent of these companies are failing in
their digital transformation efforts.

It's easier to understand why this is happening, and what the fix is, if
you're still in the early stages of growing your business. This sounds
controversial, because the notion of digital transformation that is
predominantly being pushed falsely tells us that it's all about technology.
This is often the technology that the average small business owner doesn't understand,
can't afford to implement, and doesn't think is relevant to their company
which isn't on the same scale as large corporations with their huge budgets
and big data science teams and savvy IT departments.

The truth is, if you're a small business or just getting started, you've got a
big advantage over the big players. You can start your digital transformation
now, from the beginning, and get bigger, easier benefits than the large
companies because of the scale of impact small but smart changes can have on
your bottom line.

Going digital
really means wrapping your organizational head around new opportunities, and
the best way to do that is to enlist the creative thinking of everyone on your
team. It's about creativity and culture, recognizing and exploiting new
business opportunities that derive from the combination of insights from data
and new technologies. It's a lot easier to encourage that culture of
brainstorming and insights into a small organization than a large one. You
have the ability to educate your whole staff about the true nature of digital
transformation and reap the benefits of a company-wide strategic and cultural
effort — all because you're small enough to make this manageable.

Creative thinking about seeing new visions through data is where small business
owners should get started. As a business leader, you don't have to know
everything — certainly not the ins and outs of technology. What you bring
to the table is knowledge of your business, understanding about your long-term
mission and vision, and an enthusiasm for tapping into the domain expertise and
creativity of your employees. If you preach the gospel of thinking what's
possible if only you had the right insights to the kinds of data your company
naturally generates and/or acquires, the culture you build of encouraging that
thinking will bring you benefits that a simple, blind outlay of dollars for
technology never will.

This is one of your biggest advantages as a small company: being able to
instill a culture of data-driven creativity.

The other leverage you have have over larger companies is limited risk. As you
identify sources of data and learn how to ask smart questions about how to
better serve your customers, gain new ones, and develop product or service
enhancements, you can experiment with a limited data infrastructure with
minimal risk and huge reward. By starting small and focusing your efforts this
way, you build better insights into your business and your customers, better
knowledge of the infrastructure you want to build over time, and you bulk up
institutional knowledge muscles that add to your digital transformation
skills.

So what steps can you take as a small business looking to get started with
digital transformation? Download our free list to find five practical, easy,
ideas you can start implementing today.